Web 2.0 is Essential for Embracing Online Marketing

Web 2.0 is Essential for Embracing Online Marketing:

The earliest forms of online marketing involved simple email campaigns. It wasn’t so long ago that spam was the only thing that internet consumers had to worry about. This didn’t leave marketers very much leeway with which to appeal to customers. However, the web has changed so massively in the past 20 years that there are innumerable ways to get in touch with people and actually engage with them.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the study of Web 2.0 principles. What was once a hypothesis a decade ago has now become a fundamental part of how organizations operate on the internet. It has been a long time since web pages were mostly text, punctuated by a few pictures. Today’s internet now features interactive media, videos, games, feedback controls, contact information, forums and other ways to connect users with one another.

Consequently, it is crucial for companies that want to engage in a campaign of online marketing to take advantage of all of the tools that Web 2.0 offers. Here are some of the attributes of that new flavor of online media that should be featured in almost every online advertising effort.

User input

The essential idea behind Web 2.0 is that it includes a give and take between the author of a page and the person viewing it. Whereas files were once uploaded and viewed, today they’re created, manipulated, changed forever and repackaged for subsequent users. At the end of the day, a good Web 2.0 marketing campaign involves letting consumers somehow affect the dialogue or direction of a conversation.

This can be as simple as letting users contribute to forums or message boards that a company hosts so that consumers can trade stories or ask questions about particular products and services. It could even be as simple as allowing people to upload a picture or simply log in and be counted.

Multimedia

People who browse the web have become very savvy at navigating its pages and know what constitutes engaging content and what is boring. As a result, a rich and flashy site will get a lot more attention than one that has quickly been thrown together. Fortunately, companies don’t need to have expert web developers at their sides to make this a reality. Instead, it can be done with a bit of visual design acumen and a lot of plug-ins from other sites.

The beauty of Web 2.0 is that it is democratic and available to most users. As a result, organizations can embed YouTube videos, have remotely hosted games or contact information forms right on their landing pages, connect to social media sites through “like” and “+1″ buttons or even provide links to other online presences.

Richness and detail

Clicking from one page to another through predetermined links doesn’t give users a lot of freedom, which is what they’ve become accustomed to thanks to Google and other online behemoths. It might seem like it takes a lot of technical knowledge to do this, but it’s actually quite simple. Whenever there’s a post of a video, blog entry, news story or nearly anything else, it can be tagged with a keyword or phrase. Besides making a site more appealing to engines, this allows users to look for popular terms or mundane words and find exactly what they’re searching for.

Internet position

There are a lot of ways for someone to travel from one site to another through hyperlinks, but there is also a kind of geography to the internet. Web pages that are connected to some more than others can be “sensed” by customers to be adjoining. This is important so that consumers don’t think of a web page as alone and isolated on the web. Cultivate healthy relationships with other sites, whether they’re professional organizations, collaborators or other members of a particular industry.

Web 2.0 is Essential for Embracing Online Marketing is a post from: B2B Marketing and Lead Generation | Optify